Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

Publications & Resources

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal Library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

News & Events

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

Kelsey Seymour

Visiting Predoctoral Fellow (Sep 2017-Feb 2018)

Kelsey Seymour is a PhD Candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her doctoral studies, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a double major in Music and Chinese and graduated from Cambridge University with an MPhil in Linguistics. She also earned a Masters of Flute Performance from the Royal College of Music in London. She has been a visiting student at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and a Doctoral Candidate Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.

Ms. Seymour’s dissertation research deals with how sonic activity and aural experience affected people’s religious lives in Six Dynasties and Tang China. She is concerned with how people produced sound – especially scriptural chanting – as a technique to assert control over the people and spaces that surrounded them. Not only was chanting used by Buddhists to educate others, delineate space, and as a means of reaction against government imposition, but it was also used to manipulate less-tangible aspects of religious life: as a tactic to incite miracles and manipulate supernatural agents. She is also concerned with how individuals responded to sounds they heard. Medieval Chinese people believed that hearing and producing particular kinds of sounds could incite psychosomatic transformations, such as instant conversion to Buddhism or non-decay of speech organs after death, but also that chanters and listeners could develop illnesses from sound that required meditative cures to release them from the attachment.

Projects

CurrentCompleted

Experts of Memory: Chanting as a Method and Verification of Learning in Tang Dynasty China